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Modern Sailors Find
'Endeavour'
Was a Lumbering Coal-Hauler

By

Tony Horwitz Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Updated Nov. 11, 1999 12:01 a.m. ET

ABOARD H.M. BARK ENDEAVOUR -- Charles Sitton has spent 32 years as a firefighter and one day as an 18th-century sailor. Right now, he'd feel more at ease in a burning building than where he finds himself: midway up the rigging of this ship's swaying, 130-foot mast.

"At least a fire ladder is solid," Mr. Sitton says, perched on wobbly ropes, called ratlines. The mast's topmost spar, to which he is headed, lurches like a...